The Salutation Inn

Built

Late 18th or early 19th century

Gone

Closed 1 January 2020; consented as a house in 2022

There now

A house. Change of use was approved in November 2022

Address

High Hesket, Carlisle CA4 0HS

Where exactly

In High Hesket. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the place, not the building. The position is approximate.

A village local on the main street at High Hesket, just off the A6, and trading before 1829. The building is Grade II listed, listed on 27 December 1967 and described as a public house of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century: painted rendered walls on a chamfered plinth, hipped roof of mixed Welsh and green slate, two storeys and two bays with a lower two-bay extension to the right that was probably the stables. Its earlier keepers are known only in passing. When the Carlisle solicitor J. J. Turner died in June 1970, aged 93, his obituary noted that a great-grandfather of his had been tenant of the Salutation for nearly fifty years, and called it 'a famous hostelry of the old coaching days'.

Whether the state ran it is disputed. The scheme's roll of 1920 has a Salutation at High Hesket at number 121, and the Cumberland pubs database records it passing to the scheme in 1917. But The Carlisle Kid, photographing it in 2017 and usually reliable on the scheme, wrote that while the Carlisle scheme nationalised the Rose & Crown in adjacent Low Hesket, the Salutation escaped government control.

The Cumberland News of 1 July 1966 casts doubt on any scheme ownership by then: when the landlord of fourteen years, George Stephenson, left for Guernsey at the end of August, a spokesman for Dutton's Brewery in Blackburn said the brewery, which owned the Salutation, had not yet chosen a replacement. His pet Brazilian woolly monkey, Nina, went to Jersey Zoo. High Hesket had a second scheme pub, the Cross Keys, number 82 on the same roll. Not to be confused with the Salutation at Irthington, number 120 on the roll and still trading as the Sally: two Salutations on the roll, one on the Penrith road and one out towards the Wall.

Its end is documented in unusual detail, and it is a slow one. CAMRA record it closed from 1 January 2020, and note that it was hardly open as a pub before that, with irregular hours for years. It went up for sale in September 2021. A planning application to turn it into a dwelling, 22/0867, went in on 31 August 2022 and was approved on 11 November; the licence was suspended a week later, on 18 November 2022, and CAMRA marked it permanently closed on the 25th.

Still serving, near where it stood

• Fox & Pheasant Inn

  Armathwaite
  3.6 kmaway

• The Greyhound Inn

  Cotehill
  6.1 kmaway

• Plough Inn

  Wreay
  6.2 kmaway

• Crown Inn

  Ivegill
  7.1 kmaway